A new Spanish-language print edition of Nowhere Man: Los últimos días de John Lennon is slowly making its way onto book-selling platforms throughout the world.

Though the official publication date is October 9, Lennon’s birthday, Nowhere Man is already for sale on Amazon Spain, Amazon US, and Barnes & Noble. Amazon Mexico will release the print edition on October 9. Look for it here, linked to the Kindle edition.

Review copies are now available and word of publication has begun to spread. The Beatles site, 10, Mathew Street, based in Madrid, has posted an article about the book and my upcoming trip to Buenos Aires for the launch. This journey should take place in late November–early December. As soon as the details are finalized, I will, of course, post about it here.

The new edition, re-translated by René Portas, who did the original translation for Random House Mondadori (now Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial), features a cover photo by the late Jack Mitchell, who shot Lennon and Yoko Ono on November 2, 1980, one month before a deranged fan murdered the ex-Beatle in front of the Dakota.

When the Mexico City newsweekly Proceso ran the Spanish translation of my interview with Bill Harry, the founding editor of Mersey Beat—they called it “Lennon al desnudo…” (“Lennon Naked”)—it put my John Lennon bio, Nowhere Man, back in the news. Not bad for a book that’s been in print for more than 16 years and was originally rejected by everybody.

That Nowhere Man became a cult classic, embraced by the Spanish-language media and reading public, is, in large part, due to Proceso’s ongoing coverage. They’ve been deconstructing and analyzing the book ever since Random House Mondadori (now Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial) first published the Spanish edition in 2003. (An updated e-book edition was published in June.)

Soon after Proceso ran Harry’s probing and empathetic interview, 10, Mathew Street, a Madrid-based site, and The MacWire, an American celebrity site, picked it up.

This sequence of events began when Harry posted part of the interview, amidst a flurry of comments, on his Facebook page, and I posted it here, titled “And the Mersey Beat Goes On/Y el Mersey Beat sigue” (translated by René Portas, who also translated Nowhere Man).

As Harry was the first person to interview me who knew Lennon from Liverpool, before the Beatles became a global phenomenon, I considered it significant—another step on the road to Nowhere Man’s increasing acceptance among those readers who want to know what was really going on in John Lennon’s head.

The e-book edition of Nowhere Man: Los últimos días de John Lennon is now available for pre-order on Amazon, iTunes, and Barnes & Noble and will go on sale June 27, worldwide, on all platforms. You can download a free sample here.

The list price is a numerologically harmonious $9.99, but if you bought the print edition, published by Random House Mondadori, on Amazon, you can download the e-book for 99 cents.

I’m writing this in English because my self-taught Spanish, which I can read on about a fourth-grade level, is not up to the task. That’s why René Portas, who translated the original Spanish edition, has returned to do a new and improved translation.

René, who’s in Buenos Aires, and normally translates Russian writers like Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov, reminded me how vital yet under-appreciated translators are. Translation is not a matter of simply substituting a word in English for a word in Spanish. Rather, it’s a magical process. A great translator gets inside a writer’s head and somehow transforms his (or her) distinctive voice into an entirely new idiom.

That is what René has done with Nowhere Man. And after a 13 year absence from the market, the book will once again be available. Start spreading las noticias!

When Random House Mondadori (since renamed Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial) first published Nowhere Man: Los últimos días de John Lennon in Spanish, in 2003, it sold out immediately. Since then, the book has become so difficult to find, some online dealers have been pricing it at more than $1,000.

For the past few months, the book’s original translator, René Portas (who normally translates the works of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov), has been putting together the definitive (and long-awaited) Spanish-language incarnation of the 15th anniversary Nowhere Man e-book, which was published in English last October, on Lennon’s 75th birthday.

The Spanish edition will be available worldwide within the next month—exact publication date to be announced.

In the meantime, René continues to work on making Nowhere Man perfect. And the price for this perfection will be a far more reasonable $9.99.

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